LONDON TRIUMPHS.--FIRST SET OF SERMONS.--"TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS.
III. AND IV.--COXWOLD.--VOLS. V. AND VI.--FIRST VISIT TO THE
CONTINENT.--PARIS.--TOULOUSE.
(1760-1762.)
Sterne alighted from the York mail, just as Byron "awoke one morning,"
to "find himself famous." Seldom indeed has any lion so suddenly
discovered been pursued so eagerly and by such a distinguished crowd
of hunters. The chase was remarkable enough to have left a lasting
impression on the spectators; for it was several years after (in 1773)
that Dr. Johnson, by way of fortifying his very just remark that "any
man who has a name or who has the power of pleasing will be generally
invited in London," observed gruffly that "the man Sterne," he was
told, "had had engagements for three months." And truly it would
appear from abundant evidence that "the man Sterne" gained such a
social triumph as might well have turned a stronger head than his.
Within twenty-four hours after his arrival his lodgings in Pall Mall
were besieged by a crowd of fashionable visitors; and in a few weeks
he had probably made the acquaintance of "everybody who was anybody"
in the London society of that day.
How thoroughly he relished the delights of celebrity is revealed, with
a simple vanity which almost disarms criticism, in many a passage
of his correspondence. In one of his earliest letters to Miss
Fourmantelle we find him proudly relating to her how already he "was
engaged to ten noblemen and men of fashion." Of Garrick, who had
warmly welcomed the humourist whose merits he had been the first to
discover, Sterne says that he had "promised him at dinner to numbers
of great people." Amongst these great people who sought him out for
themselves was that discerning patron of ability in every shape, Lord
Rockingham. In one of the many letters which Madame de Medalle flung
dateless upon the world, but which from internal evidence we can
assign to the early months of 1760, Sterne writes that he is about to
"set off with a grand retinue of Lord Rockingham's (in whose suite I
move) for Windsor" to witness, it should seem, an installation of
a Knight of the Garter. It is in his letters to Miss Fourmantelle,
however, that his almost boyish exultation at his London triumph
discloses itself most frankly. "My rooms," he writes, "are filling
every hour with great people of the first rank, who strive who shall
most honour me." Never, he believes, had such homage been rendered to
any man by devotees so distinguished. "The honours paid me were the
greatest that were ever known from the great."
The self-painted portrait is not, it must be confessed, altogether
an attractive one. It is somewhat wanting in dignity, and its air of
over-inflated complacency is at times slightly ridiculous. But we must
not judge Sterne in this matter by too severe a standard. He was by
nature neither a dignified nor a self-contained man: he had a head
particularly unfitted to stand sudden elevation; and it must be
allowed that few men's power of resisting giddiness at previously
unexplored altitudes was ever so severely tried. It was not only "the
great" in the sense of the high in rank and social distinction by
whom he was courted; he was welcomed also by the eminent in genius and
learning; and it would be no very difficult task for him to flatter
himself that it was the latter form of recognition which, he really
valued most. Much, at any rate, in the way of undue elation may be
forgiven to a country clergyman who suddenly found himself the centre
of a court, which was regularly attended by statesmen, wits, and
leaders of fashion, and with whom even bishops condescended to open
gracious diplomatic communication. "Even all the bishops," he writes,
"have sent their compliments;" and though this can hardly have been
true of the whole Episcopal Bench, it is certain that Sterne received
something more than a compliment from one bishop, who was a host in
himself. He was introduced by Garrick to Warburton, and received high
encouragement from that formidable prelate.[1]
[Footnote 1: It is admitted, moreover, in the correspondence with Miss
Fourmantelle that Sterne received something more substantial from the
Bishop, in the shape of a purse of gold; and this strange present gave
rise to a scandal on which something will be said hereafter.]
The year 1760, however, was to bring to Sterne more solid gains than
that of mere celebrity, or even than the somewhat precarious money
profits which depend on literary vogue. Only a few weeks after his
arrival in town he was presented by Lord Falconberg with the curacy of
Coxwold, "a sweet retirement," as he describes it, "in comparison of
Sutton," at which he was in future to pass most of the time spent
by him in Yorkshire. What obtained him this piece of preferment is
unknown. It may be that _Tristram Shandy_ drew the Yorkshire peer's
attention to the fact that there was a Yorkshireman of genius living
within a few miles of a then vacant benefice in his lordship's gift,
and that this was enough for him. But Sterne himself says--in writing
a year or so afterwards to a lady of his acquaintance--"I hope I have
been of some service to his lordship, and he has sufficiently requited
me;" and in the face of this plain assertion, confirmed as it is by
the fact that Lord Falconberg was on terms of friendly intimacy with
the Vicar of Coxwold at a much later date than this, we may dismiss
idle tales about Sterne's having "black-mailed" the patron out of a
presentation to a benefice worth no more, after all, than some 70£ a
year net.
There is somewhat more substance, however, in the scandal which got
abroad with reference to a certain alleged transaction between Sterne
and Warburton. Before Sterne had been many days in London, and while
yet his person and doings were the natural subjects of the newest
gossip, a story found its way into currency to the effect that the
new-made Bishop of Gloucester had found it advisable to protect
himself against the satiric humour of the author of the _Tristram
Shandy_ by a substantial present of money. Coming to Garrick's ears,
it was repeated by him--whether seriously or in jest--to Sterne,
from whom it evoked a curious letter, which in Madame de Medalle's
collection has been studiously hidden away amongst the correspondence
of seven years later. "'Twas for all the world," he began, "like a cut
across my finger with a sharp pen-knife. I saw the blood--gave it a
suck, wrapt it up, and thought no more about it.... The story you told
me of Tristram's pretended tutor this morning"--(the scandal was, that
Warburton had been threatened with caricature in the next volume of
the novel, under the guise of the hero's tutor)--"this vile story, I
say, though I then saw both how and where it wounded, I felt little
from it at first, or, to speak more honestly (though it ruins my
simile), I felt a great deal of pain from it, but affected an air,
usual in such accidents, of feeling less than I had." And he goes on
to repudiate, it will be observed, not so much the moral offence of
corruption, in receiving money to spare Warburton, as the intellectual
solecism of selecting him for ridicule. "What the devil!" he
exclaims, "is there no one learned blockhead throughout the schools
of misapplied science in the Christian world to make a tutor of for
my Tristram--are we so run out of stock that there is no one
lumber-headed, muddle-headed, mortar-headed, pudding-head chap amongst
our doctors...but I must disable my judgment by choosing a Warburton?"
Later on, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Croft, at Stillington, whom
the scandal had reached through a "society journal" of the time, he
asks whether people would suppose he would be "such a fool as to fall
foul of Dr. Warburton, my best friend, by representing him so weak a
man; or by telling such a lie of him as his giving me a purse to buy
off the tutorship of Tristram--or that I should be fool enough to own
that I had taken a purse for that purpose?" It will be remarked that
Sterne does not here deny having received a purse from Warburton,
but only his having received it by way of black-mail: and the most
mysterious part of the affair is that Sterne did actually receive the
strange present of a "purse of gold" from Warburton (whom at that time
he did not know nor had ever seen); and that he admits as much in one
of his letters to Miss Fourmantelle. "I had a purse of guineas given
me yesterday by a Bishop," he writes, triumphantly, but without
volunteering any explanation of this extraordinary gift. Sterne's
letter to Garrick was forwarded, it would seem, to Warburton; and the
Bishop thanks Garrick for having procured for him "the confutation of
an impertinent story the first moment I heard of it." This, however,
can hardly count for much. If Warburton had really wished Sterne to
abstain from caricaturing him, he would be as anxious--and for much
the same reasons--to conceal the fact as to suppress the caricature.
He would naturally have the disclosure of it reported to Sterne
for formal contradiction, as in fulfilment of a virtual term in the
bargain between them. The epithet of "irrevocable scoundrel," which
he afterwards applied to Sterne, is of less importance, as proceeding
from Warburton, than it would have been had it come from any one not
habitually employing Warburton's peculiar vocabulary; but it at least
argues no very cordial feeling on the Bishop's side. And, on the
whole, one regrets to feel, as I must honestly confess that I do feel,
far less confident of the groundlessness of this rather unpleasant
story than could be wished. It is impossible to forget, however, that
while the ethics of this matter were undoubtedly less strict in those
days than they are--or, at any rate, are recognized as being--in our
own, there is nothing in Sterne's character to make us suppose him to
have been at all in advance of the morality of his time.
The incumbent-designate did not go down at once to take possession of
his temporalities. His London triumph had not yet run its course. The
first edition of Vols. I. and II. of _Tristram Shandy_ was exhausted
in some three months. In April, Dodsley brought out a second; and,
concurrently with the advertisement of its issue, there appeared--in
somewhat incongruous companionship--the announcement, "Speedily will
be published, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick." The judicious Dodsley, or
possibly the judicious Sterne himself (acute enough in matters of
this kind), had perceived that now was the time to publish a series of
sermons by the very unclerical lion of the day. There would--they,
no doubt, thought--be an undeniable piquancy, a distinct flavour of
semi-scandalous incongruity in listening to the Word of Life from the
lips of this loose-tongued droll; and the more staid and serious the
sermon, the more effective the contrast. There need not have been
much trouble in finding the kind of article required; and we may be
tolerably sure that, even if Sterne did not perceive that fact for
himself, his publisher hastened to inform him that "anything would
do." Two of his pulpit discourses, the Assize Sermon and the Charity
Sermon, had already been thought worthy of publication by their author
in a separate form; and the latter of these found a place in the
series; while the rest seem to have been simply the chance sweepings
of the parson's sermon-drawer. The critics who find wit, eccentricity,
flashes of Shandyism, and what not else of the same sort in these
discourses, must be able--or so it seems to me--to discover these
phenomena anywhere. To the best of my own judgment the Sermons
are--with but few and partial exceptions--of the most commonplace
character; platitudinous with the platitudes of a thousand pulpits,
and insipid with the _crambe repetita_ of a hundred thousand homilies.
A single extract will fully suffice for a specimen of Sterne's
pre-Shandian homiletic style; his post-Shandian manner was very
different, as we shall see. The preacher is discoursing upon the
well-worn subject of the inconsistencies of human character:
"If such a contrast was only observable in the different stages of
a man's life, it would cease to be either a matter of wonder or of
just reproach. Age, experience, and much reflection may naturally
enough be supposed to alter a man's sense of things, and so entirely
to transform him that, not only in outward appearance but in the
very cast and turn of his mind, he may be as unlike and different
from the man he was twenty or thirty years ago as he ever was from
anything of his own species. This, I say, is naturally to be accounted
for, and in some cases might be praiseworthy too; but the observation
is to be made of men in the same period of their lives that in
the same day, sometimes on the very same action, they are utterly
inconsistent and irreconcilable with themselves. Look at the man in
one light, and he shall seem wise, penetrating, discreet, and brave;
behold him in another point of view, and you see a creature all over
folly and indiscretion, weak and timorous as cowardice and
indiscretion can make him. A man shall appear gentle, courteous,
and benevolent to all mankind; follow him into his own house,
maybe you see a tyrant morose and savage to all whose happiness
depends upon his kindness. A third, in his general behaviour,
is found to be generous, disinterested, humane, and friendly. Hear
but the sad story of the friendless orphans too credulously trusting
all their whole substance into his hands, and he shall appear more
sordid, more pitiless and unjust than the injured themselves have
bitterness to paint him. Another shall be charitable to the poor,
uncharitable in his censures and opinions of all the rest of the
world besides: temperate in his appetites, intemperate in his tongue;
shall have too much conscience and religion to cheat the man who
trusts him, and perhaps as far as the business of debtor and creditor
extends shall be just and scrupulous to the uttermost mite; yet in
matters of full or great concern, where he is to have the handling
of the party's reputation and good name, the dearest, the tenderest
property the man has, he will do him irreparable damage, and rob him
there without measure or pity."--Sermon XI.--_On Evil Speaking_.
There is clearly nothing particularly striking in all that, even
conveyed as it is in Sterne's effective, if loose and careless, style;
and it is no unfair sample of the whole. The calculation, however, of
the author and his shrewd publisher was that, whatever the intrinsic
merits or demerits of these sermons, they would "take" on the strength
of the author's name; nor, it would seem, was their calculation
disappointed. The edition of this series of sermons now lying before
me is numbered the sixth, and its date is 1764; which represents a
demand for a new edition every nine months or so, over a space of
four years. They may, perhaps, have succeeded, too, in partially
reconciling a certain serious-minded portion of the public to the
author. Sterne evidently hoped that they might; for we find him
sending a copy to Warburton, in the month of June, immediately after
the publication of the book, and receiving in return a letter of
courteous thanks, and full of excellent advice as to the expediency
of avoiding scandal by too hazardous a style of writing in the future.
Sterne, in reply, protests that he would "willingly give no offence to
mortal by anything which could look like the least violation of either
decency or good manners;" but--and it is an important "but"--he cannot
promise to "mutilate everything" in _Tristram_ "down to the prudish
humour of every particular" (individual), though he will do his best;
but, in any case, "laugh, my Lord, I will, and as loudly as I can."
And laugh he did, and in such Rabelaisian fashion that the Bishop
(somewhat inconsistently for a critic who had welcomed Sterne on
the appearance of the first two volumes expressly as the "English
Rabelais") remarked of him afterwards with characteristic vigour, in
a letter to a friend, that he fears the fellow is an "irrevocable
scoundrel."
The volumes, however, which earned "the fellow" this Episcopal
benediction were not given to the world till the next year. At the
end of May or beginning of June, 1760, Sterne went to his new home
at Coxwold, and his letters soon begin to show him to us at work upon
further records of Mr. Shandy's philosophical theory-spinning and the
simpler pursuits of his excellent brother. It is probable that this
year, 1760, was, on the whole, the happiest year of Sterne's life.
His health, though always feeble, had not yet finally given way;
and though the "vile cough" which was to bring him more than once to
death's door, and at last to force it open, was already troubling him,
he had that within him which made it easy to bear up against all
such physical ills. His spirits, in fact, were at their highest. His
worldly affairs were going at least as smoothly as they ever went.
He was basking in that sunshine of fame which was so delightful to a
temperament differing from that of the average Englishman, as does the
physique of the Southern races from that of the hardier children of
the North; and lastly, he was exulting in a new-born sense of creative
power which no doubt made the composition of the earlier volumes of
_Tristram_ a veritable labour of love.
But the witty division of literary spinners into silkworms and
spiders--those who spin because they are full, and those who do so
because they are empty--is not exhaustive. There are human silk-worms
who become gradually transformed into spiders--men who begin writing
in order to unburden a full imagination, and who, long after that
process has been completely performed, continue writing in order to
fill an empty belly; and though Sterne did not live long enough to
"write himself out," there are certain indications that he would
not have left off writing if and when he felt that this stage of
exhaustion had arrived. His artistic impulses were curiously combined
with a distinct admixture of the "potboiler" spirit; and it was with
something of the complacency of an annuitant that he looked forward to
giving the public a couple of volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ every year
as long as they would stand it. In these early days, however, there
was no necessity even to discuss the probable period either of the
writer's inspiration or of the reader's appetite. At present the
public were as eager to consume more Shandyism as Sterne was ready to
produce it: the demand was as active as the supply was easy. By the
end of the year Vols. III. and IV. were in the press, and on January
27, 1761, they made their appearance. They had been disposed of in
advance to Dodsley for 380_l._--no bad terms of remuneration in
those days; but it is still likely enough that the publisher made
a profitable bargain. The new volumes sold freely, and the public
laughed at them as heartily as their two predecessors. Their author's
vogue in London, whither he went in December, 1760, to superintend
publication, was as great during the next spring as it had been in
the last. The tide of visitors again set in all its former force and
volume towards the "genteel lodgings." His dinner list was once more
full, and he was feasted and flattered by wits, beaux, courtiers,
politicians, and titled-lady lion-hunters as sedulously as ever. His
letters, especially those to his friends the Crofts, of Stillington,
abound, as before, in touches of the same amusing vanity. With how
delicious a sense of self-importance must he have written these words:
"You made me and my friends very merry with the accounts current at
York of my being forbad the Court, but they do not consider what a
considerable person they make of me when they suppose either my going
or not going there is a point that ever enters the K.'s head; and
for those about him, I have the honour either to stand so personally
well-known to them, or to be so well represented by those of the first
rank, as to fear no accident of the kind." Amusing, too, is it to note
the familiarity, as of an old _habitué_ of Ministerial antechambers,
with which this country parson discusses the political changes of
that interesting year; though scarcely more amusing, perhaps, than the
solemnity with which his daughter disguises the identity of the new
Premier under the title B----e; and by a similar use of initials
attempts to conceal the momentous state secret that the D. of R. had
been removed from the place of Groom of the Chambers, and that Sir
F.D. had succeeded T. as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Occasionally,
however, the interest of his letters changes from personal to public,
and we get a glimpse of scenes and personages that have become
historical. He was present in the House of Commons at the first grand
debate on the German war after the Great Commoner's retirement from
office--"the pitched battle," as Sterne calls it, "wherein Mr. P.
was to have entered and thrown down the gauntlet" in defence of his
military policy. Thus he describes it:
"There never was so full a House--the gallery full to the top--I
was there all the day; when lo! a political fit of the gout seized the
great combatant--he entered not the lists. Beckford got up and
begged the House, as he saw not his right honourable friend there,
to put off the debate--it could not be done: so Beckford rose up
and made a most long, passionate, incoherent speech in defence of
the German war, but very severe upon the unfrugal manner it was
carried on, in which he addressed himself principally to the C[hancellor]
of the E[xchequer], and laid on him terribly.... Legge
answered Beckford very rationally and coolly. Lord K. spoke long.
Sir F. D[ashwood] maintained the German war was most pernicious....
Lord B[arrington] at last got up and spoke half an hour
with great plainness and temper, explained many hidden things relating
to these accounts in favour of the late K., and told two or
three conversations which had passed between the K. and himself
relative to these expenses, which cast great honour upon the K.'s
character. This was with regard to the money the K. had secretly
furnished out of his own pocket to lessen the account of the
Hanover-score brought us to discharge. Beckford and Barrington
abused all who fought for peace and joined in the cry for it,
and Beckford added that the reasons of wishing a peace now were
the same as at the Peace of Utrecht--that the people behind the
curtain could not both maintain the war and their places too, so
were for making another sacrifice of the nation to their own interests.
After all, the cry for a peace is so general that it will certainly
end in one."
And then the letter, recurring to personal matters towards the close,
records the success of Vols. III. and IV.:
"One half of the town abuse my book as bitterly as the other half cry
it up to the skies--the best is they abuse and buy it, and at such a
rate that we are going on with a second edition as fast as possible."
This was written only in the first week of March, so that the edition
must have been exhausted in little more than a month. It was, indeed,
another triumph; and all through this spring up to midsummer did
Sterne remain in London to enjoy it. But, with three distinct flocks
awaiting a renewal of his pastoral ministrations in Yorkshire, it
would scarcely have done for him, even in those easy-going days of
the Establishment, to take up his permanent abode at the capital; and
early in July he returned to Coxwold.
From the middle of this year, 1761, the scene begins to darken, and
from the beginning of the next year onward Sterne's life was little
better than a truceless struggle with the disease to which he was
destined, prematurely, to succumb. The wretched constitution which,
in common with his short-lived brothers and sisters, he had inherited
probably from his father, already began to show signs of breaking
up. Invalid from the first, it had doubtless been weakened by the
hardships of Sterne's early years, and yet further, perhaps, by the
excitements and dissipations of his London life; nor was the change
from the gaieties of the capital to hard literary labour in a country
parsonage calculated to benefit him as much as it might others. Shandy
Hall, as he christened his pretty parsonage at Coxwold, and as the
house, still standing, is called to this day, soon became irksome
to him. The very reaction begotten of unwonted quietude acted on his
temperament with a dispiriting rather than a soothing effect. The
change from his full and stimulating life in London to the dull
round of clerical duties in a Yorkshire village might well have been
depressing to a mind better balanced and ballasted than his. To him,
with his light, pleasure-loving nature, it was as the return of the
schoolboy from pantomimes and pony-riding to the more sober delights
of Dr. Swishtail's; and, in a letter to Hall Stevenson, Sterne reveals
his feelings with all the juvenile frankness of one of the Doctor's
pupils:
"I rejoice you are in London--rest you there in peace; here 'tis the
devil. You were a good prophet. I wish myself back again, as you
told me I should, but not because a thin, death-doing, pestiferous
north-east wind blows in a line directly from Crazy Castle turret
fresh upon me in this cuckoldly retreat (for I value the north-east
wind and all its powers not a straw), but the transition from rapid
motion to absolute rest was too violent. I should have walked about
the streets of York ten days, as a proper medium to have passed
through before I entered upon my rest; I stayed but a moment, and
I have been here but a few, to satisfy me. I have not managed my
miseries like a wise man, and if God for my consolation had not
poured forth the spirit of Shandyism unto me, which will not suffer
me to think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else just
now lay down and die."
It is true he adds, in the next sentence, that in half an hour's time
"I'll lay a guinea I shall be as merry as a monkey, and forget it
all," but such sudden revulsions of high spirits can hardly be allowed
to count for much against the prevailing tone of discontented _ennui_
which pervades this letter.
Apart, moreover, from Sterne's regrets of London, his country home
was becoming from other causes a less pleasant place of abode. His
relations with his wife were getting less and less cordial every year.
With a perversity sometimes noticeable in the wives of distinguished
men, Mrs. Sterne had failed to accept with enthusiasm the _rôle_
of distant and humbly admiring spectator of her brilliant husband's
triumphs. Accept it, of course, she did, being unable, indeed, to help
herself; but it is clear that when Sterne returned home after one of
his six months' revels in the gaieties of London, his wife, who had
been vegetating the while in the retirement of Yorkshire, was not in
the habit of welcoming him with effusion. Perceiving so clearly that
her husband preferred the world's society to hers, she naturally,
perhaps, refused to disguise her preference of her own society to his.
Their estrangement, in short, had grown apace, and had already
brought them to that stage of mutual indifference which is at once so
comfortable and so hopeless--secure alike against the risk of "scenes"
and the hope of reconciliation, shut fast in its exemption from
_amantium irae_ against all possibility of _redintegratio amoris._
To such perfection, indeed, had the feeling been cultivated on both
sides, that Sterne, in the letter above quoted, can write of his
conjugal relations in this philosophic strain:
"As to matrimony I should be a beast to rail at it, for my wife is
easy, but the world is not, and had I stayed from her a second longer
it would have been a burning shame--else she declares herself
happier without me. But not in anger is this declaration made (the
most fatal point, of course, about it), but in pure, sober, good sense,
built on sound experience. She hopes you will be able to strike a
bargain for me before this twelvemonth to lead a bear round Europe,
and from this hope from you I verily believe it is that you are
so high in her favour at present. She swears you are a fellow of wit,
though humorous;[2] a funny, jolly soul, though somewhat splenetic,
and (hating the love of women) as honest as gold. How do you
like the simile?"
There is, perhaps, a touch of affected cynicism in the suggestion that
Mrs. Sterne's liking for one of her husband's friends was wholly based
upon the expectation that he would rid her of her husband; but mutual
indifference must, it is clear, have reached a pretty advanced stage
before such a remark could, even half in jest, be possible. And with
one more longing, lingering look at the scenes which he had quitted
for a lot like that of the Duke of Buckingham's dog, upon whom his
master pronounced the maledictory wish that "he were married and lived
in the country," this characteristic letter concludes:
"Oh, Lord! now are you going to Ranelagh to-night, and I am sitting
sorrowful as the prophet was when the voice cried out to him
and said, 'What do'st thou here, Elijah?' 'Tis well that the spirit
does not make the same at Coxwold, for unless for the few sheep
left me to take care of in the wilderness, I might as well, nay, better,
be at Mecca. When we find we can, by a shifting of places, run
away from ourselves, what think you of a jaunt there before we
finally pay a visit to the Vale of Jehoshaphat? As ill a fame as we
have, I trust I shall one day or other see you face to face, so tell the
two colonels if they love good company to live righteously and soberly,
_as you do_, and then they will have no doubts or dangers within
or without them. Present my best and warmest wishes to them,
and advise the eldest to prop up his spirits, and get a rich dowager
before the conclusion of the peace. Why will not the advice suit
both, _par nobile fratrum?_"
[Footnote 1: It is curious to note, as a point in the chronology of
language, how exclusive is Sterne's employment of the words "humour,"
"humourists," in their older sense of "whimsicality," "an eccentric."
The later change in its meaning gives to the word "though" in the
above passage an almost comic effect.]
In conclusion, he tells his friend that the next morning, if Heaven
permit, he begins the fifth volume of _Shandy_, and adds, defiantly,
that he "cares not a curse for the critics," but "will load my vehicle
with what goods He sends me, and they may take 'em off my hands or let
'em alone."
The allusions to foreign travel in this letter were made with,
something more than a jesting intent. Sterne had already begun to be
seriously alarmed, and not without reason, about the condition of his
health. He shrank from facing another English winter, and meditated
a southward flight so soon as he should have finished his fifth
and sixth volumes, and seen them safe in the printer's hands. His
publisher he had changed, for what reason is not known, and the firm
of Becket & De Hondt had taken the place of Dodsley. Sterne hoped by
the end of the year to be free to depart from England, and already he
had made all arrangements with his ecclesiastical superiors for the
necessary leave of absence. He seems to have been treated with all
consideration in the matter. His Archbishop, on being applied to, at
once excused him from parochial work for a year, and promised, if
it should be necessary, to double that term. Fortified with this
permission, Sterne bade farewell to his wife and daughter, and betook
himself to London, with his now completed volumes, at the setting in
of the winter. On the 21st of December they made their appearance, and
in about three weeks from that date their author left England,
with the intention of wintering in the South of France. There were
difficulties, however, of more kinds than one which had first to be
faced--a pecuniary difficulty, which Garrick met by a loan of 20£.,
and a political difficulty, for the removal of which Sterne had to
employ the good offices of new acquaintance later on. He reached Paris
about the 17th of January, 1762, and there met with a reception
which interposed, as might have been expected, the most effectual of
obstacles to his further progress southward. He was received in Paris
with open arms, and stepped at once within the charmed circle of the
philosophic _salons_. Again was the old intoxicating cup presented to
his lips--this time, too, with more dexterous than English hands--and
again did he drink deeply of it. "My head is turned," he writes to
Garrick, "with what I see, and the unexpected honour I have met with
here. _Tristram_ was almost as much known here as in London, at least
among your men of condition and learning, and has got me introduced
into so many circles ('tis _comme à Londres_) I have just now a
fortnight's dinners and suppers on my hands." We may venture to doubt
whether French politeness had not been in one respect taken somewhat
too seriously by the flattered Englishman, and whether it was much
more than the name and general reputation of _Tristram_, which was
"almost as much known" in Paris as in London. The dinners and suppers,
however, were, at any rate, no figures of speech, but very liberal
entertainments, at which Sterne appears to have disported himself with
all his usual unclerical _abandon_. "I Shandy it away," he writes in
his boyish fashion to Garrick, "fifty times more than I was ever wont,
talk more nonsense than ever you heard me talk in all your days,
and to all sorts of people. 'Qui le diable est cet homme-là?' said
Choiseul, t'other day, 'ce Chevalier Shandy?'" [We might be listening
to one of Thackeray's Irish heroes.] "You'll think me as vain as a
devil was I to tell you the rest of the dialogue." But there were
distinguished Frenchmen who were ready to render to the English author
more important services than that of offering him hospitality and
flattery. Peace had not been formally concluded between France and
England, and the passport with which Sterne had been graciously
furnished by Pitt was not of force enough to dispense him from making
special application to the French Government for permission to remain
in the country. In this request he was influentially backed. "My
application," he writes, "to the Count de Choiseul goes on swimmingly,
for not only M. Pelletière (who by-the-bye sends ten thousand
civilities to you and Mrs. G.) has undertaken my affair, but the Count
de Limbourg. The Baron d'Holbach has offered any security for the
inoffensiveness of my behaviour in France--'tis more, you rogue! than
you will do." And then the orthodox, or professedly orthodox, English
divine, goes on to describe the character and habits of his strange
new friend: "This Baron is one of the most learned noblemen here, the
great protector of wits and of the _savans_ who are no wits; keeps
open house three days a week--his house is now, as yours was to me, my
own--he lives at great expense." Equally communicative is he as to his
other great acquaintances. Among these were the Count de Bissie, whom
by an "odd incident" (as it seemed to his unsuspecting vanity) "I
found reading _Tristram_ when I was introduced to him, which I was,"
he adds (without perceiving the connexion between this fact and the
"incident"), "at his desire;" Mr. Fox and Mr. Macartney (afterwards
the Lord Macartney of Chinese celebrity), and the Duke of Orleans (not
yet Égalité) himself, "who has suffered my portrait to be added to the
number of some odd men in his collection, and has had it taken most
expressively at full length by a gentleman who lives with him." Nor
was it only in the delights of society that Sterne was now revelling.
He was passionately fond of the theatre, and his letters to
Garrick are full of eager criticism of the great French performers,
intermingled with flatteries, sometimes rather full-bodied than
delicate, of their famous English rival. Of Clairon, in _Iphigénie_,
he says "she is extremely great. Would to God you had one or two
like her. What a luxury to see you with one of such power in the same
interesting scene! But 'tis too much." Again he writes: "The French
comedy I seldom visit; they act scarce anything but tragedies; and the
Clairon is great, and Mdlle. Dumesmil in some parts still greater than
her. Yet I cannot bear preaching--I fancy I got a surfeit of it in my
younger days." And in a later letter:
"After a vile suspension of three weeks, we are beginning with
our comedies and operas. Yours I hear never flourished more; here
the comic actors were never so low; the tragedians hold up their
heads in all senses. I have known _one little man_ support the theatrical
world like a David Atlas upon his shoulders, but Préville can't
do half as much here, though Mad. Clairon stands by him and sets
her back to his. She is very great, however, and highly improved
since you saw her. She also supports her dignity at table, and has
her public day every Thursday, when she gives to eat (as they say
here) to all that are hungry and dry. You are much talked of here,
and much expected, as soon as the peace will let you. These two
last days you have happened to engross the whole conversation at
the great houses where I was at dinner. 'Tis the greatest problem
in nature in this meridian that one and the same man should possess
such tragic and comic powers, and in such an _equilibrio_ as to divide
the world for which of the two Nature intended him."
And while on this subject of the stage let us pause for a moment
to glance at an incident which connects Sterne with one of the most
famous of his French contemporaries. He has been asked "by a lady of
talent," he tells Garrick, "to read a tragedy, and conjecture if it
would do for you. 'Tis from the plan of Diderot; and, possibly, half
a translation of it: _The Natural Son, or the Triumph of Virtue_,
in five acts. It has too much sentiment in it (at least for me); the
speeches too long, and savour too much of preaching. This may be
a second reason it is not to my taste--'tis all love, love, love
throughout, without much separation in the characters. So I fear it
would not do for your stage, and perhaps for the very reason which
recommends it to a French one." It is curious to see the "adaptator
cerebrosuga" at work in those days as in these; though not, in this
instance, as it seems, with as successful results. _The Natural Son,
or the Triumph of Virtue_, is not known to have reached either English
readers or English theatrical audiences. The French original, as we
know, fared scarcely better. "It was not until 1771," says Diderot's
latest English biographer, "that the directors of the French Comedy
could be induced to place _Le Fils Naturel_ on the stage. The actors
detested their task, and, as we can well believe, went sulkily through
parts which they had not taken the trouble to master. The public felt
as little interest in the piece as the actors had done, and after one
or two representations, it was put aside.[1]"
[Footnote 1: Morley: _Diderot and the Encyclopaedists_, ii. 305.]
Another, and it is to be guessed a too congenial, acquaintance formed
by Sterne in Paris was that of Crébillon; and with him he concluded "a
convention," unedifying enough, whether in jest or earnest: "As soon
as I get to Toulouse he has agreed to write me an expostulatory
letter upon the indecorums of _T. Shandy_, which is to be answered
by recrimination upon the liberties in his own works. These are to
be printed together--Crébillon against Sterne, Sterne against
Crébillon--the copy to be sold, and the money equally divided. This
is good Swiss-policy," he adds; and the idea (which was never carried
out) had certainly the merit of ingenuity, if no other.
The words "as soon as I get to Toulouse," in a letter written from
Paris on the 10th of April, might well have reminded Sterne of the
strange way in which he had carried out his intention of "wintering
in the South." He insists, however, upon the curative effects of his
winter of gaiety in Paris. "I am recovered greatly," he says; "and if
I could spend one whole winter at Toulouse, I should be fortified in
my inner man beyond all danger of relapsing." There was another, too,
for whom this change of climate had become imperatively necessary.
For three winters past his daughter Lydia, now fourteen years old,
had been suffering severely from asthma, and needed to try "the last
remedy of a warmer and softer air." Her father, therefore, was about
to solicit passports for his wife and daughter, with a view to their
joining him at once in Paris, whence, after a month's stay, they were
to depart together for the South. This application for passports he
intended, he said, to make "this week:" and it would seem that the
intention was carried out; but, for reasons explained in a letter
which Mr. Fitzgerald was the first to publish, it was not till the
middle of the next month that he was able to make preparation for
their joining him. From this letter--written to his Archbishop, to
request an extension of his leave--we learn that while applying for
the passports he was attacked with a fever, "which has ended the worst
way it could for me, in a _défluxion (de) poitrine_, as the French
physicians call it. It is generally fatal to weak lungs, so that I
have lost in ten days all I have gained since I came here; and from
a relaxation of my lungs have lost my voice entirely, that 'twill
be much if I ever quite recover it. This evil sends me directly to
Toulouse, for which I set out from this place directly my family
arrives." Evidently there was no time to be lost, and a week after the
date of this letter we find him in communication with Mrs. and
Miss Sterne, and making arrangements for what was, in those days, a
somewhat formidable undertaking--the journey of two ladies from the
North of England to the centre of France. The correspondence which
ensued may be said to give us the last pleasant glimpse of Sterne's
relations with his wife. One can hardly help suspecting, of course,
that it was his solicitude for the safety and comfort of his
much-loved daughter that mainly inspired the affectionate anxiety
which pervades these letters to Mrs. Sterne; but their writer is, at
the very least, entitled to credit for allowing no difference of tone
to reveal itself in the terms in which he speaks of wife and child.
And, whichever of the two he was mainly thinking of, there is
something very engaging in the thoughtful minuteness of his
instructions to the two women travellers, the earnestness of his
attempts to inspire them with courage for their enterprise, and
the sincere fervour of his many commendations of them to the Divine
keeping. The mixture of "canny" counsel and pious invocation
has frequently a droll effect: as when the advice to "give the
custom-house officers what I told you, and at Calais more, if you have
much Scotch snuff;" and "to drink small Rhenish to keep you cool, that
is, if you like it," is rounded off by the ejaculation, "So God in
Heaven prosper and go along with you!" Letter after letter did he
send them, full of such reminders as that "they have bad pins and vile
needles here," that it would be advisable to bring with them a strong
bottle-screw, and a good stout copper tea-kettle; till at last, in
the final words of preparation, his language assumes something of the
solemnity of a general addressing his army on the eve of a well-nigh
desperate enterprise: "Pluck up your spirits--trust in God, in me,
and yourselves; with this, was you put to it, you would encounter all
these difficulties ten times told. Write instantly, and tell me you
triumph over all fears--tell me Lydia is better, and a help-mate to
you. You say she grows like me: let her show me she does so in her
contempt of small dangers, and fighting against the apprehensions of
them, which is better still."
At last this anxiously awaited journey was taken; and, on Thursday,
July 7, Mrs. Sterne and her daughter arrived in Paris. Their stay
there was not long--not much extended, probably, beyond the proposed
week. For Sterne's health had, some ten days before the arrival of his
family, again given him warning to depart quickly. He had but a few
weeks recovered from the fever of which he spoke in his letter to
the Archbishop, when he again broke a blood-vessel in his lungs. It
happened in the night, and "finding in the morning that I was likely
to bleed to death, I sent immediately," he says, in a sentence which
quaintly brings out the paradox of contemporary medical treatment,
"for a surgeon to bleed me at both arms. This saved me"--_i.e._ did
not kill me--"and, with lying speechless three days, I recovered upon
my back in bed: the breach healed, and in a week after I got out."
But the weakness which ensued, and the subsequent "hurrying about," no
doubt as cicerone of Parisian sights to his wife and daughter, "made
me think it high time to haste to Toulouse." Accordingly, about the
20th of the month, and "in the midst of such heats that the oldest
Frenchman never remembers the like," the party set off by way of Lyons
and Montpellier for their Pyrenean destination. Their journey seems to
have been a journey of many mischances, extraordinary discomfort, and
incredible length; and it is not till the second week in August that
we again take up the broken thread of his correspondence. Writing to
Mr. Foley, his banker in Paris, on the 14th of that month, he speaks
of its having taken him three weeks to reach Toulouse; and adds that
"in our journey we suffered so much from the heats, it gives me pain
to remember it. I never saw a cloud from Paris to Nismes half as
broad as a twenty-four sols piece. Good God! we were toasted, roasted,
grilled, stewed, carbonaded, on one side or other, all the way: and
being all done through (_assez cuits_) in the day, we were eat up at
night by bugs and other unswept-out vermin, the legal inhabitants, if
length of possession give right, at every inn on the way." A few miles
from Beaucaire he broke a hind wheel of his carriage, and was obliged
in consequence "to sit five hours on a gravelly road without one
drop of water, or possibility of getting any;" and here, to mend the
matter, he was cursed with "two dough-hearted fools" for postilions,
who "fell a-crying 'nothing was to be done!'" and could only be
recalled to a worthier and more helpful mood by Sterne's "pulling off
his coat and waistcoat," and "threatening to thrash them both within
an inch of their lives."
The longest journey, however, must come to an end; and the party found
much to console them at Toulouse for the miseries of travel. They were
fortunate enough to secure one of those large, old comfortable houses
which were and, here and there, perhaps, still are to be hired on the
outskirts of provincial towns, at a rent which would now be thought
absurdly small; and Sterne writes in terms of high complacency of
his temporary abode. "Excellent," "well furnished," "elegant beyond
anything I ever looked for," are some of the expressions of praise
which it draws from him. He observes with pride that the "very great
_salle à compagnie_ is as large as Baron d'Holbach's;" and he records
with great satisfaction--as well he might--that for the use of this
and a country house two miles out of town, "besides the enjoyment of
gardens, which the landlord engaged to keep in order," he was to pay
no more than thirty pounds a year. "All things," he adds, "are cheap
in proportion: so we shall live here for a very, very little."
And this, no doubt, was to Sterne a matter of some moment at this
time. The expenses of his long and tedious journey must have been
heavy; and the gold-yielding vein of literary popularity, which he
had for three years been working, had already begun to show signs of
exhaustion. _Tristram Shandy_ had lost its first vogue; and the fifth
and sixth volumes, the copyright of which he does not seem to have
disposed of, were "going off" but slowly.